Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Damn, growing up..

A popular online shopping website is celebrating Uncle Pai's Birth Anniversary by giving attractive discounts on Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha titles. I had come back from a long but a satisfying day at work, and the first thing that I noticed after opening Facebook was this ad. Instantly, the gleam , that familiar gleam flashed in my eyes. This is the exact kind of euphoria I used to experience when I would see the latest copy of Tinkle delivered to my doorstep by the newspaper-guy during my childhood.

Memories began to come back to me. It's amazing how a particular memory of the past triggers a sort of a chain reaction that would connect and bring back all the related jovial memories of that time. Those days when I would read all the old editions of Tinkle digests from the archive of my school library, those afternoons before unit tests when a slim copy of the 72-paged colorful bliss would stay concealed in those huge textbooks which would be read in secrecy- all of that, started coming back.

I was so psyched and fascinated with Tinkle that I had also once recorded a series of stories , narrating the strips myself and thus I made my own version of Tinkle audio-cassettes. Suppandi, Pyaarelal, Tantri, Shambhu would mean the world to me. My summer would be spent reading and finishing the Holiday Special editions. I would save some stories so that I could read them during the later part of my vacation. I wrote a letter to Uncle Pai as a part of the contest, and had won one of the 10 consolation prizes. I would come back from school every afternoon to inquire whether we received any reply from them. I even went to the post office one day to check whether it was misplaced. I remember that when I had eventually received a reply from the contest organizers, it contained a personal message from Uncle Pai , citing the fact that my letter reached them 17 days late (email wasn't popular 10 years ago) , but since it wasn't in my control , and since I had posted it well before the deadline, so they had decided to give me the consolation prize anyway. I would keep that letter with me in my school-bag and would show it off to my school-friends with pride. Tinkle was the reason my English improved drastically, and was the precursor to me being an appreciator of creativity. I could never thank the team of writers and artists enough for what hey had gifted me and million other children like me , making me what I am today.

Excited, I went on to visit the website to order some issues of Tinkle. The covers, the pictures, the summary, they didn't appear appealing enough. It's as if they had lost the charm which would bind me, when I was a kid. The characters of the stories seemed pretty childish. The language seemed ordinary. I somehow couldn't place an order.